The newest version of the premier sports management sim, Sports Interactive’s Football Manager was announced yesterday. Football Manager 2012 will feature over 800 new features, including an overhauled match engine, more advanced scouting and contract negotiations, as well as a brand new tutorial to bed new players into the game’s famous depth. I had the chance to chat to Football Manager’s director, Miles Jacobson, about the new game.

Congratulations on the new game. Could you just give me a rundown of the main new features? For the hardcore fan who likes playing career games we’ve added in the functionality to allow you to turn leagues on and off. So if you’re managed in England for a few years and decide you want to go off and get a job in Spain, you can put the Spanish league in and start applying for jobs there.

We’ve made huge improvements to how you see the match being played, there’s new animations, new crowds, extra stadiums, a couple of new cameras. That’s all looking really good. We’ve got something for people who like technology in the adaptive layout, which means if you’re playing in a high resolution you actually get more information on the screen.

We’ve improved the way you can talk to players and your staff inside the game by adding in a tone system, so now there are six different tones that you can use to talk to players. Which will have a massive effect on conversations you have with them. Some people like having an arm put round them and other people only see sense if you shout at them, so you have to be careful what you use for which person.

There’s also loads of changes to contracts. One of the changes being for contract negotiations, if you’re in the midst of a negotiation and the agent keeps coming back asking for £6,000 a week and you can “only” afford to pay them £4,000, you can lock that £4,000 so the agent will know you’re not going to budge from that and might come back asking for different contract clauses to make up the difference.

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We’ve worked with scouts with a few different clubs to come up with the kind of report that a manager would get in real life for the next opposition reports. There’s all kind of information in there, including where goals have been scored, what time of play they were scored, analysis of the squad, tactical information. And the tactical information goes as deep to show you how you’ve performed against particular tactics, and how particular tactics have performed against you.

And for people who have never played the game before there’s a brand new tutorial mode, which will actually give you a little hand-holding guide into how to play the game when you first start. Which is something we haven’t managed to do successfully before, but this year we think we’ve got there.

Every game wants new players, of course, but is it more difficult for Football Manager in particular. Would you say that the new tutorial is a sign that’s it’s something of a focus for you? I wouldn’t say it’s something we concentrate on, but it’s something that we’re wary we’re not very good at. We are perfectionists over at SI so we’ve always been slightly frustrated with not making the perfect game. If we did we’d all have to go and get proper jobs. I think there is a holy grail with any game that’s as in-depth as ours that you want to come up with a way to simplify things, to let people get into it easier. The tutorial is far and away the best way we’ve had to introduce people to the series. So, hopefully, it will go down well.

When you’re deciding on new features, how much is fan feedback, and how much is stuff you’ve been thinking of for a while? Fan feedback is essential from our forums, from our huge Facebook community and from the affiliate websites. The way that we decide things is that any idea that anyone inside the studio likes, wherever it has come from, goes into a big features database. And then once a year we go through every new suggestion and we vote on them as a team. But no one knows where these ideas have come from. It doesn’t matter where the idea comes from for that meeting, so there’s no bias, and no one will vote on an idea because they want a payrise at the end of the year. Certainly a large proportion that have made it into the game this year were things that were on the forums or mentioned by fans. Whether that’s the first time it’s been mentioned or whether it was an idea we had already logged is another story. Good ideas come from anywhere and everywhere.

So will this year’s game feature philosophical tweets from Joey Barton? There’s no philiosophical tweets from Joey Barton. You can tweet from inside the game, rather than Twitter being part of the game. But there’s no tweets from Joey Barton saying what he did was right and then going on the radio a few hours later and saying what he did was wrong. So no, all players inside Football Manager have been banned by their clubs from using Twitter.

In seriousness though, with that kind of fluff that surrounds the modern game, are you keen to keep that well away from something from Football Manager? It depends what you mean really. We keep away from the WAG side of things, we keep away from players getting done for speeding, but that’s as much for legal reasons as much as anything else. We all know what sells papers and what makes people go and read things. People have to sell their media any way they can do, but we’re making a football game that hopefully deals with the positive side of the sport.

Do you ever worry with every layer you add on that the complexity can become too much? Yes, we do worry about that. It’s very much something that keeps me awake at night, which is one of the reasons we’ve got the tutorial mode in there, one of the reasons we’ve added the intelligent interface. While we’re adding in more complexity, we need to make sure we introduce it in the most simple way to use as possible. But we have realised that the game has become too in depth for some people. But we’ve now got Football Manager Handheld on iOS and PSP for those people. We’re trying to make sure everyone who likes playing management games has a version of Football Manager to play.

You’ve had a lot of success with your iOS game, is it safe to assume there will be a new version of that soon too? Definitely. There will be another one that will come before Christmas. But the feature set is very different to the PC game, so we’ll be detailing that a little way down the line.

How important is that market to you now? Is it a focus, or is it PC first, iOS second? We have pretty much equal focus on three of the four markets that we’re in. We have equal focus on PC, iPhone and the online market. We’re working on a new online title at the moment called Football Manager Online which is going to be specifcally for the South Korean market to start off with. We also have a PSP release which probably doesn’t have the full focus of the studio, mainly because we’ve run out of memory on the PSP and there’s very little else we can do on that particular game. But we will continue to make it as long as people want to play it.

So would you be interested in the PlayStation Vita when that comes around? I don’t personally know that much about the Vita yet. But we’ve never been early adopters at SI. We don’t tend to be the first on the platform, we just try to be the best when we get there. And long may that continue. We’ll have a look at Vita when it comes out. I really like the 3DS aswell. I’m not sure if there’s anything we can do with that, but it’s something we’ll look at once this cycle is out of the way.

You’ve said there won’t be a return to home console until you find the right control scheme. Any progress on that? None at all. In fact we’ve gone the other way. SEGA did a huge study last year to try and work out exactly why it was that the console version didn’t work out. Obviously control scheme was right up there, but also up there was that people don’t like having the TV in their living room taken over for six hour session. They’d much rather be sitting on a laptop while they watch something on TV. So, no, we’re not looking at going back to home consoles any time soon.

You closed down Football Manager Live recently, why was that? There were various design decisions we had made early on in the project that all of us were involved with. And they ended up being things that we couldn’t reverse, but made it that the game just wouldn’t be successful in the long-term. Having smaller gameworlds rather than one huge gameworld meant that gameworlds were always going to empty at some point. So basically, we cocked up. We tried to reboot the project, and we went in a more hardcore direction than we ever envisiged the project being in, beause that’s what the people playing wanted. But we just couldn’t turn it around, we couldn’t get it to work as a game that was going to pay for the people that were working on it. So that’s why it went away, but there was loads of positives from it. The technology we got from it is fantastic and everyone that was working on the project has a new role inside the studio.

Is the lack of Premier League licencing a source of frustration for you? It’s business. EA have an exclusive licence and that’s the way they want to do their business. And that’s fine. As long as it doesn’t stop us releasing then it’s ok. Of course I’d like to have the licence. We’d like to be giving money to clubs in the Premier League that can be spent on grass roots stuff, but EA have an exclusive licence and that precludes us from being able to have one and we just accept it. Each time it become available we will carry on pushing our point across as to why we think we should have one and why it should be non-exclusive. And then it’s up to the leagues themselves whether they want to do that or not.

Finally, do you have any tips for budding managers getting into Football Manager that aren’t having much luck? My best advice for anyone who’s struggling to play the game is to go to our forums at community.sigames.com, and post on there saying that you need help. It might sound like a copout, but there is no one way to play Football Manager, everyone plays it differently. And the great thing about our community and the other community websites out there is that there will be someone out there who plays the game in the same way you do. So there will be someone who will be able to help you or point you in the right direction. We’re very lucky in that our community are a fantastic group of people who do want to help people as long as they’re asked nicely. It’s definitely a good thing to go and get involved with.

Football Manager 2012 will be released on PC and Mac before Christmas 2011